Marooned on Mars

Rothman told him. He brought both images together, each in a separate color, on a third screen, and began setting up the first to show the probable speed of the meteorites in relation to the ship. This required compensating for the spin of the ship.

“There!” He pointed to one that was the size of a small marble and much too close. Rothman nodded at Vance, holding up one finger. The ship blasted forward for a tenth of a second. They waited perhaps another second, but no sound reached them from the walls.

“Missed,” Vance said tersely. “But we can’t keep it up. We…”

There was a sound like a rifle bullet hitting a steel shed, and a harsher sound immediately after it. One, smaller than a pea, had gotten through to them, drilling through the ship and out again. At speeds measured in miles per second, even the smallest particle was dangerous. Apparently all these were small—too small for the Lunar observatory to have seen them—-but there must have been thousands or more in the space ahead.

“Patch it,” Vance ordered. Steele, Lew, and Sokolsky nodded and were gone. They’d have to find the first tiny hole and the second larger one, slap plates over them, and weld them in place before the air could rush out into space.

The swarm had thinned out for a time. Chuck kept his eyes on the plate,, but there were only a few seconds of grace before they began to run into more.

“That first one must have been as big as a melon,” Rothman told Chuck. “The automatic alarm went on and Lew didn’t have time to set things up. We were simply lucky. Or we’re in bad luck. There isn’t supposed to be one chance in fifty of running into a meteorite between here and Mars. They’re mostly spread out pretty thin, and we’re a small target for all that space.”

Although the meteorites swung about the sun in orbits like the planets, they were comparatively rare. There had been only one case of trouble in all the trips to the Moon from Earth. But the Eros seemed jinxed.

Now they were approaching the other edge of the swarm where they .were thicker again. Someday there would be fully automatic machinery that figured their courses automatically and instantly, to drive ships safely out of their paths. But that was still in the future. Everything now depended on the accuracy of Chuck’s compensations, and the skill of Rothman in interpreting the little data he could get.

“Two!” Chuck called, and Rothman signaled Vance quickly.

This time the Eros seemed to go wild as the full power of her jets flashed on, and cut off. But it had not been successful, for however close Rothman’s guess had been, placing the ship exactly between both was too much to expect

Something hit the wall of the ship with a shriek of rock against metal. It flashed by Chuck’s nose, not a foot away, already white hot from the friction of its passage. It splatted against the control board, hissed, and disappeared, leaving a six-inch hole in the wall opposite the tiny half-inch hole it had made on entering.

Air began sighing out. Chuck snapped up the thin ship’s log and slapped it down over the larger hole, where air pressure forced it into tight contact. Vance had already covered the smaller hole with an eraser.

Steele came in with Lew and Sokolsky. All three showed signs of bruises from the slamming around they had taken when the rockets went on, but none seemed to realize it. They slid quickly cut sections of metal under the crude stoppers and began work with a small electric welder. In a few minutes, the holes were sealed.

The last of the streaks had vanished from the screens. Chuck turned the radar back to Lew, and reported the fact to Vance, who nodded slowly.

The captain was-staring at the wreck the meteorite had made of part of the control board. He moved to the panel and began testing, while Steele dropped down to study it directly.

“Some of the rocket-firing controls are damaged— you’ll have an unsteady blast. And that first meteorite wrecked the gyroscopes. We’re in a fine pickle.”

“Yeah. We’re probably safe enough now, until we reach Mars. But we’ll have to do some beautiful repair work if we’re going to make a safe landing there. Chuck, you did a good job—finer than could be expected. It’s not your fault—or yours either, Nat We came through better than we had any right to. Now the question is, how much and how soon can we repair things?”

He turned to Steele. The engineer shook his head. “I can get the gyroscopes remounted, but they won’t hold as high a speed, and I can’t promise how long the bearings will work. Chuck, you helped install this mess—take a look at it.”

Chuck bent down to the damaged wiring. It was a complete mess. Everything would have to be torn out and completely redone—enough following diagrams and re-soldering to last for months. He reported it, while Vance

searched through the papers in one of the wall safes for the diagrams.

“All right,” the captain told them finally. “Get busy. We’ve got a lot of time left, fortunately. But we can’t tell when we may need things again. Probably we won’t even get another meteorite signal on our screens. But I’m not betting on anything.”

All the men on the ship were trained at several things. Vance was a fair substitute for any of the men, as was Steele. Rothman was a fairly skilled geologist, capable of estimating the mineral resources of Mars, as well as being a pilot. Doctor Sokolsky was as much of a biologist as a medical doctor. From working with has father. Chuck had most of his father’s skill at engineering. “Lew had made a skilled hobby of archaeology. And even Ginger Parsons, who claimed only to be the world’s best photographer and-a fair cook, had a good grounding in science and mathematics.

But this was a job for two men only, since there was room for no more. The control panel work fell to Chuck and Lew automatically; Vance or Rothman would be with them, to operate the ship when needed, but they would ‘have to reconstruct the wiring by themselves.

Chuck went for his space suit, preferring from experience to do his soldering without air around; it didn’t make a great deal of difference, except for the more delicate work; but there, even the finest wire could be handled with a hot iron without fear of damage. Lew was awkward at first, but once the air was pumped out of the control room, he soon caught the knack.

It was tricky work. The original wiring had been done in sections, using complicated, specialized tools; the sub-assemblies had then been welded into place and hooked up. Now they had to begin work directly, trusting to extensions on their tools to get into the cramped space, and trying to organize it so that they would finish each section as they went along.

Twice the first day. Chuck had to pull out most of what had been done, in order to get in with parts that had seemed simple enough in the diagrams, but simply couldn’t be inserted as they had planned.

There was wire enough, and most of the parts were in stock in the big supply rooms along the central well. But many of the coils had been left out on the theory that they could be wound when needed; it was a good theory, if only one or two coils had to be made. But coil-winding was slow and tedious work.

There were tables that showed how the coils should be wound. But handwork is never exact. The prepared coils had to be tested on Q-meters and other instruments. Sometimes they were satisfactory. More often, time was spent in adding a few turns, removing turns, or squeezing and pulling the coils into the correct behavior. There Chuck’s work with his homemade set proved excellent experience; Lew had worked only with standard parts, and was less able to cut and manipulate parts into operating condition.

One section was finally finished, and Vance tried it out, It worked—but it would have taken long hours of practice to figure out how to compensate for small errors.

“It’s wired right—I know it is. And everything in it meets the limits set in the specifications,” Chuck told his captain. “It should be working exactly as it did before.”

Steele grinned at him. “Chuck, this is just like radar work. You can follow specs and get something that does well enough most of the time. But I saw the men who installed these panels. In the shop, they’d tested right on the button. Here, they drifted off. The installation took a long time—because they had to go over everything and rework it. Those panels interact; one of them throws another just a little off.”

Chuck groaned. But the engineer was right When he tested the whole assembly on his meters, he found that it would take days more to regulate its action to the correct degree of accuracy.

Next time, on later panels, he wouldn’t worry so much about exact behavior of the individual parts. He’d have to take care of that after the assembly was fixed, anyway.